‘Genius’ who turned down $1,000,000 cash prize after solving math problem had incredible response to why he did it
Emily Brown
Featured Image Credit: Famous Mathemeticians/Reddit
If someone was offering a cash prize of $1,000,000 to solve a math problem, you'd better believe I'd throw everything I had into solving it to try and get my hands on the cash.
Admittedly, math isn't my strong point, but if you had the ability and the chance of becoming a millionaire, wouldn't you give it a go?
I imagine a lot of people are on the same page as me, but not Grigori Perelman.
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Perelman is a mathematician from Russia, who managed to solve a century-old math problem posed in 1904 by French mathematician Henri Poincaré. Doing so meant he won a $1,000,000 reward - but he decided to turn it down.
Now, if you're not big on math, stay with me.
Poincaré's problem related to spaces that seem like ordinary three-dimensional space, but are finite in extent.
It hypothesized that if such a space has the additional property that each loop in the space can be continuously tightened to a point, then it is necessarily a three-dimensional sphere.
Get it? I definitely don't, but the point is that Perelman managed to solve the problem in 2002, after other experts had spent decades trying to crack it.
In 2010, Perelman was granted the $1 million cash prize by the Clay Mathematics Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which had attributed $1 million to seven particularly elusive challenges.
But rather than take the money and run, the mathematician rejected the offer.
Obviously the big question at this point is, why?!
Well, it turns out that Perelman is a better person than most, as his decision to turn down the money stemmed from another expert who he believed had been overlooked.
Richard S. Hamilton had pioneered a differential equation in the field known the Ricci flow, and Perelman felt this contribution was just as important as his own success in solving the math problem.
Explaining his decision, Perelman said: "I don't like their decisions, I consider them unjust."
Though Perelman's rejection of the money might seem baffling to you and I, it wasn't totally out of the ordinary for Perelman, who had previously declined the prestigious Fields Medal, stating: "I'm not interested in money or fame; I don't want to be on display like an animal in a zoo.
"I'm not a hero of mathematics. I'm not even that successful; that is why I don't want to have everybody looking at me."
In a 2010 interview with The Guardian, Sergei Kisliakov, the director of Perelman's former workplace, the St Petersburg's Steklov Mathematics Institute, said: "He has rather strange moral principles. He feels tiny improper things very strongly."
Kisliakov also revealed that Perelman had decided to quit the world of mathematics, saying: "He severed all contact with the community, and wanted to find a job unrelated to maths."